Burberry For Her Elixir and the New Protocol For Communicating Intensity
Fragrance Reviews

Burberry’s new flanker to its For Her pillar, For Her Elixir, exemplifies the same strategy for communicating the concept of “intense” as Gucci Bloom Intense – simple sweetness. This development direction is surprising and at odds with the common olfactory language for intense that the industry took decades to build. 

Traditionally, flankers (popularised in the early 2000s) sought to illustrate notions of intensity common across multiple sensory modes (high drama, thrill, richness, impact, focus, tension, potency, vehemence) via association to dark colours, complexity, high weight, and thick density. In olfactory form, this meant balancing the pyramid towards the base, increasing the number of base notes, and heightening projection and longevity. By and large this required upping the concentration of the entire blend, making the core profile woodier, more resinous, and spicier, and perhaps including a starker contrast between opposing poles such as bitter and sweet, sweet and sour, sharp and smooth, or dark and light. 
 

It never used to mean a reduction in detail. The new trend demonstrated by For Her Elixir and Gucci Bloom Intense is almost contradictory to two decades of tactics constructing a currency for “intensity”. These two compositions seek to convey a sense of the intense by stripping their skeleton to their bare bones, building big block colour inflated with sweetness, almost cartoonish and childish, like the intensity of a bubble-gum pink confectionary on your eyes and in your mouth. In connotation and narrative, it’s the furthest thing that can be from the old-school values of an eau intense as cipher for maturity, smoulder, and seduction. 

For Her Elixir mimics the classic strawberry accord from L’Oreal’s famed children’s shampoo. Whilst Kate Spade’s New York alluded to the same landmark product, attempting to coax nostalgia from the deep-rooted memories attached to carefree childhood bathing, For Her Elixir clumsily copies it, adding nothing, saying nothing. Its texture is that of foam, sudsy and synthetic like a balloon, void of body and core. Instead, you’ll feel an overwhelming sense of sweetness on steroids – sticky, shiny, and baby pink. Compared to the original For Her, a scent that sought contrast between naturalistic berries and a magical forest accord of moss and oak, For Her Elixir has no base and no top – just a never-ending mid of sugar-flushed blush. 

Perhaps these two big-brand releases reflect a new direction for propositions of intense in the years to come – sweet and simple with monstrous projection and throw, rather than the more traditional spicy and woody redistribution of materials. Be on the lookout!